Ishlandwana

[soutie]

as we all know in the 1879 i think it was ,the zulu impi defeated a modern day
british army at the time ,at a major battle.Now historians have said they could,nt get the ammo boxes open ,or their rifles overheated,however after
battle ground excavations they found out the british defensive line was to far away from the base camp and the soldiers where standing to far apart,hence bad leadership,its a known fact that chelmsford did not listen to reports of the where abouts of the main zulu impi,plus his comment a bunch of savages
with spears we will crush them ,do you think he was out generaled or was he such a bad commander that anyone could have defeated him.

[zraver]

as we all know in the 1879 i think it was ,the zulu impi defeated a modern day
british army at the time ,at a major battle.Now historians have said they could,nt get the ammo boxes open ,or their rifles overheated,however after
battle ground excavations they found out the british defensive line was to far away from the base camp and the soldiers where standing to far apart,hence bad leadership,its a known fact that chelmsford did not listen to reports of the where abouts of the main zulu impi,plus his comment a bunch of savages
with spears we will crush them ,do you think he was out generaled or was he such a bad commander that anyone could have defeated him.

Well for sure he was damn sure a poor student of history. The Impi was the Roman Manipulative Legion born again. As such in hand to hand combat it was superior to modern arms which relied soley on the bayonet (spear).

Like American's in Vietnam and Iraq or Imperial Britian in Afghanistan he placed too much faith in firepower as a substatute to actual boots on the ground. This was his undoing, although he was defeated his defeat doomed the Zulu kingdom. His troopers both at Islwanda and both the flying colums plus the defenders of Rourkes Drift gutted the Zulu army, and at the same time enraged/inspired the Home Islands into sending overwhelming force.

Had he been more cautious and denied the Zulus the fight they wanted the war may have dragged on past the point where England felt it was productive to continue it.

I wont say he was a bad general, he was thrust into a war no one had trained to fight in over 1500 years. I will point out however that beaten once, Lieutenant General Frederick Augustus Thesiger 2nd baron of Chelmsford learned quickly and crushed Zulu power once and for all at Ulundi.

Robert E Lee. Rommel, Mainstein, Zukov ect all tasted defeat on the battlefeild and are still regarded as military peers. Any stain on Chelmsford has more to do with racism than true charges of miltiary incompetence.

[bodie]

Just in case you folk havenot been keeping up with the news,

Why the outcry over one white man’s death? I’ll tell you why

To listen to David Rattray narrate the story of Isandlwana was akin to watching the best-scripted, best-directed and best-produced movie Hollywood’s finest studios could put out.
It was goose-bump stuff.
Interspersing Zulu war commands and Welsh-accented battle instructions in English with rapid tales, he brought to life the eerie expanse that is the Isandlwana battlefield.
He would remind his listener that it is because of this battle that the word “Zulu” is in the lexicon of air-traffic controllers, fighter pilots and sailors .
Without Rattray , one wonders if that battle would today enjoy the rightful place that it occupies among humanity’s greatest military moments.
The story of Isandlwana — the story that Rattray dedicated his life to preserving — was the story of a battle in which the British army suffered one of its heaviest casualties during the days of Empire.
Isandlwana was the finest moment in Southern Africa’s wars of resistance as the indigenous people tried to fight off marauding invaders from that island off the coast of France.
It was a favourite fireside story, one that grandfathers and village elders have related to six-year-olds for over 120 years.
Rattray told that story in lyrical detail to the thousands from all over the world who made the pilgrimage to Isandlwana, and to many more who listened to his lectures and his tapes.
At Isandlwana he would sit his audience up up up on the hill overlooking the battlefield. For four hours he would take you through the battle, minute by minute, step by step. He would tell you about how the armies marched towards a particular spot, why it was almost a predestined thing that this great battle should take place below that very ominous protrusion of a hill.
The audience would be enraptured. You saw the armies drifting towards each other, towards the inevitable. And then you watched the battle being fought, cannons being fired and spears being plunged through the red jackets of the Welsh regiment.
You watched, and wished you could press the replay button.
Such was the storytelling power of David Rattray. His encyclopaedic knowledge of the Anglo-Zulu conflict was the result of painstaking research conducted over decades. He had pored over diaries, letters, journals and any written word on the Anglo-Zulu war. He had travelled the length and breadth of KwaZulu-Natal interviewing greying men to whom stories of that great battle had been told by grandfathers. He had travelled to the United Kingdom, speaking to the families of British soldiers who had fought in the war.
He lectured at top universities and would even be invited by business schools to speak about the strategy lessons to be learnt from Isandlwana.


Now he is dead.


Although he had written widely about the war and passed his knowledge to a group of local youngsters who will no doubt keep the flame of Isandlwana alive, a great deal of intellectual capital has been lost. Irreplaceable will be the passion with which he tackled his subject.


Now, there are many who will ask , why the hullabaloo over the death of one white man when people are murdered every day in South Africa?

That is exactly the problem. Rattray had a name, a face and a following.

He is their face today.
Tomorrow there will probably be another face, a black face.

There are many more who die like him, breaking the hearts of their families and communities.

There is always anger at the criminals, at the police and at a state that seems to be letting it happen.

According to the government’s own statistics, nearly 19000 South Africans were murdered in the year to September 2006.
That is a lot of dead South Africans.

Most of them, by the way, poor and black.
With no voice except a wailing at the graveside.

President Thabo Mbeki appeared to show empathy in his New Year message when he addressed the issue of crime.

Just in case anyone thought he was just mouthing New Year’s platitudes, he went further, in his ANC anniversary speech, saying:
“The scourge of crime continues to bedevil our young democracy.”

But then he seemed to have a rethink, and decided that empathy is for sissies. That crime is out of control is a “perception”, he told us the other night. We should be grateful that things are not as bad as 13 years ago, the ruling party and the national police commissioner tell us — conveniently omitting the fact that a civil war was still very much on the go in the townships then.

There’s a serious problem here, and it is not just with the criminals. It is with the attitude of our rulers.

For several years at the turn of the century, we were witness to an unfunny circus act as the head of state refused to accept the reality of our Aids crisis.
Fortunately, rational science and the weight of popular opinion defeated this denialism. But we had lost time. We had expended energy on useless battles. And we had lost lives.
We do not have a few years to waste debating “perceptions” and stupid comparisons between the war being waged on us by criminals and the war that apartheid’s surrogates were waging against the people.

We can only hope that the death of the much-loved storyteller of Isandlwana will be the spur for South Africans to scream “Enough!” so loud that it will pierce the armour that cossets the heart of our supreme ruler.